The Age of Enlightenment: Adwaith on Solas
Post-punk trio Adwaith have always been outspoken from voicing adolescent frustrations to reflections on recovery. But they have more to say, returning with a double album written entirely in the Welsh language
“I remember when they announced ‘The winner is Adwaith!’ I just cried ‘Fuck off!’,” begins Hollie Singer, guitarist and vocalist of the Welsh trio. She’s snuggled up beside her two bandmates, bassist Gwenllian Anthony and drummer Heledd Owen, on a single sofa in their rehearsal space. The group is recalling the moment when they won the Welsh Music Prize for the second time beating off homegrown heroes Manic Street Preachers and wonky pop patron Cate Le Bon. “I had to work in Starbucks the next morning,” continues Singer, clearly dumbfounded. “We were in the paper and I was in work like…,” she mimicks holding the front page aloft to her colleagues.
Adwaith has never been a band to shy away from the local spotlight. In fact, it was the lack of young women in its glare that propelled them to come together almost a decade ago. “When we would go to gigs in the Welsh music scene, there would be no females,” says Singer. “We thought, ‘We could do this!’” Three years on and their debut Melyn (meaning yellow) showcased a real moment of autonomy for the Carmarthen-based friends. Holed up in the rural residential studio space of Giant Wafer allowed Adwaith not only to tap into the evocative landscapes around them but also explore the impossible. “Nothing was too silly. Nothing was too crazy. Nothing was a stupid idea,” reasons Singer.
The reception proved the group’s cosmic take on post-punk guitars was far from crazy, bagging them their first Welsh Music Prize win the following year. Follow-up Bato Mato pushed their creativity to even more radical realms, confidently pulling from sprawling shoegaze into more doom-dwelling, monster riffs. No wonder they snatched the title again in 2022. If Prize founder BBC 6Music radio presenter Huw Stephens is looking “to celebrate the best new music in Wales,” a band like Adwaith continues to push the brief for fresh and forward-thinking.
None more so than with latest record Solas, a Celtic word meaning enlightenment. This month’s returning release marks Adwaith’s most ambitious body of work to date; the first double album from an all-female Welsh-language band. Long gone are the days of local exports like Super Furry Animals and Catatonia shirking off their mother tongue for the mainstream English chart positions, something that SFA keyboardist Cian Ciaran later admitted feeling guilty about in a 2020 VICE interview sharing, “We felt we had to in order to make a living. We hit a glass ceiling.” Instead, a new legion of Welsh language acts like Adwaith, Gwenno (her first solo full-length Y Dydd Olaf was almost entirely in Welsh) and, more recently, drill music maker Sage Todz is finally cutting through. “It's so difficult to even make a living as a musician now,” posits Owen. “Why would you compromise if you can't even make a living singing in English? Why would you compromise on what you want to do?”
There are no compromises with a bumper release like Solas though. “We did pre-production this time which we've never done before,” relays Anthony, “so we went to the studio with every single idea, riff, and GarageBand demo.” The plan was to narrow down to a smaller selection of fine-tuned songs until a happy problem presented itself, as Singer confesses. “We were like, 'Well, they're all good so now what?' Then Steff (Steffan Pringle, a Cardiff-based producer) was like, 'It's almost like you're doing a double album!'” “We’ve not strayed from the idea since,” concludes Anthony.
There are so many things that have led Adwaith here. Singing in the Welsh language has been a big boon on home turf and beyond. Their transient relationship with recording has fostered a healthy curiosity in the studio. Prepare for an eclectic array of instrumentation. Plucked piano strings from a broken upright. Owen’s 3D-printed pipe lands “somewhere between an oboe and a recorder.” Anthony “hitting a trumpet with a drumstick” and picking up the flute. Even the rise of “track creep” as an album’s form continues to evolve thanks to the streaming era. (See: Taylor Swift turning 2024’s The Tortured Poet’s Department into a surprise 31-track double album, and Kanye West’s 2021 27-track release Donda one of the longest albums this decade to reach No.1 on the Billboard 200).
But the real standout is the band’s growth, not just personally as friends but professionally as a trio of ambitious and astute musicians. “These three albums have documented us growing into women sharing our view on the world as three female people from rural Wales and that story hasn't been told before,” says Singer. Anthony agrees. “We've really found ourselves musically and as people, and we're confident in what we've done. [We’ll] look back at this album knowing that was the moment that we reached our peak!” As daughters of the Welsh dragon living in such a mountainous landscape though, surely the next embers of an idea are already burning in their bellies.
Solas is released on 7 Feb via Libertino Music; Adwaith play Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, 26 Feb; Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 27 Feb